Blogs

Our blogs provide fresh, impassioned and authoritative commentary and insight about the variety of civil-liberties issues that the ACLU of Michigan takes up each day in our courts, governments and communities.

Get Involved

With the help of dedicated volunteers and community activists, the ACLU of Michigan works to raise awareness about the importance of preserving the individual rights and liberties that are guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.

Get Help

The ACLU of Michigan is one of more than 50 affiliates in the United States. As such, we encourage you to know as much as possible about your civil liberties. Further, if you feel those liberties have been violated, we suggest you submit a complaint. We only accept complaints that occur within the State of Michigan. If your complaint arose in a state other than Michigan, you must contact the ACLU office in that state.

About Us

Since our founding in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union has led the fight to conserve our most precious liberties. Through the passion of our supporters, we have grown from a roomful of civil liberties activists to an organization of more than 500,000 active members and supporters with 54 state affiliate offices as well as a legislative office in Washington, DC.

MPowerED: Empowering Michigan Education

The ACLU of Michigan has devoted a large part of its mission to reforming education in Michigan. Along with our efforts to guarantee that the state’s schoolchildren have a right to read, we are also working alongside experts and activists to implement a host of other reforms aimed at boosting the quality of education in our schools.

Through our communications, legal and legislative work, we seek to shed light on some of the most pressing problems facing our school districts—inadequate funding, lack of transparency, unstable and unsafe learning environments—and to work with teachers, administrators and other experts to provide recommendations to address these problems.

We believe that Michigan has the potential to be a national standard-bearer for public education, and we think it’s our role to help push the state to such heights.

As part of this role, we have developed the MPowerED campaign, an ongoing, statewide effort to transform how we think, talk about and, ultimately, operate public education in Michigan. From capital expenditures to standardized testing, from literacy education to zero-tolerance discipline policies--Michigan has seen a dramatic decline in everything from the conditions of its schools to the resources so essential to teaching and serving students and maintaining successful districts. In big cities and small towns alike, literacy education is suffering; school facilities are crumbling; and many of the leaders tasked with fixing the problem seem torn between bad ideas for education reform and no ideas at all.

Meanwhile, many of our students—especially those in financially strapped districts—find themselves inundated with a growing host of problems that stem from the state’s educational shortcomings. In many districts, children read far below grade level. Standardized test scores suffer. Fewer Michigan public-school students are finding a path to college—or the means to stay even if they do manage to enroll.

With MPowerED, the ACLU of Michigan adds yet another dimension to its ongoing fight to make the change many of our districts so desperately need. Driven by our vision of quality education for all, we continue to take up the challenges of empowering Michigan education for one central reason: Our children cannot afford for us to fail.